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Inspirational music Oct 23, 2009
Since discovering Elliott Carter's music twelve months ago I now find it difficult to listen to anything else while at work in my studio. I'm sure this will pass but I can't see it happening for a while yet. The two Naxos offerings performed by Pacifica Quartet are a bargain at this price.
I have now purchased most of Carter's work on disc but the most listened to are the two already mentioned along with four others:-(1)Clarinet Concerto, London Sinfonietta under Michael Collins, combined with Symphonia sum fluxae pretium spei, BBC Symphony Orchestra under Oliver Knussen (2)Three Occasions for Orchestra, Violin Concerto and Concerto for Orchestra, London Synfionetta under Oliver Knussen (3)Dialogues, Boston Concerto, Cello Concerto and ASKO Concerto, various orchestras again under Oliver Knussen (4)Sonata for Flute Oboe Cello and Harpsichord, Sonata for Cello and Piano, Double Concerto with Two Orchestras all performed by the Contempory Chamber Ensemble under Arthur Weisberg.
While I enjoy my entire collection of Carter's music these six discs are nothing less than a revelation.
7 of 7 found the following review helpful:
Superlative May 26, 2008
This recording is every bit the equal of the earlier Julliard and Arditti discs. Its probably fair to say that Pacifica strikes a midpoint between the coolness of the Arditti recordings and the almost romantic warmth of Julliard. This music benefits from multiple interpetations and viewpoints so it is difficult to speak of one approach being definitive or markedly superior to another when musicians the quality of the Pacifica, Arditti and Julliard quartets are involved. The sound quality here is excellent and given that the Julliard recording is currently out of print, I would recommend this as the first choice for anyone heretofore unfamiliar with Carter's quartets.
4 of 5 found the following review helpful:
Excellent sound and performance Mar 22, 2008
This is a stellar recording in all respects- performance, sound, programming. I can't wait for the coming issue of the middle 3!
9 of 9 found the following review helpful:
Elliott Carter on Naxos Feb 13, 2008
This year includes the 100th birthday of the great American composer Elliott Carter (b. 1908). To celebrate the occasion, Naxos is releasing two CDs consisting of Carter's five string quartets, the first and the fifth of which are included on this disk. The Pacifica Quartet, a group of young musicians from California, perform these difficult works with passion and clarity. The Pacifica Quartet specializes in contemporary music, especially the works of Elliott Carter.
Carter began the serious study of music as an adolescent and his efforts were encouraged by Charles Ives. In the 1940s, some of his music (including his first symphony available on Naxos in a recording by Kenneth Schermerhorn) is reminiscent of the Americana music of Aaron Copland, but Carter soon developed his own unmistakably modernist musical voice. (The Schermerhorn CD also includes the difficult Carter piano concerto.) The five string quartets, written over a period of 45 years give an outstanding overview of this modernist American composer.
Although Carter's quartets bristle with difficulties for the performer and listener, I was struck by the accessibility and the visceral, emotional character of these quartets when I first listened through them. There is a tendency to over-intellectualize modern music and Carter's music in particular. But this is music which, when given the chance, speaks to the heart first, before it speaks to the mind, and which mirrors the complexity of both specifically modern experience and of the human condition.
Carter's first string quartet, composed in 1950-51, was among his first modernist efforts. It is a lengthy, difficult work in five movement which are played without a break between them. The work is densely scored, with bristling harmonies and marked shifts in tempos and rhythm. The texture of the work also is full of shifts, from passages for solo instruments, to sections for impassioned ensemble playing, to moments when the quartet breaks into two groups (the cello and the viola playing against the two violins in the fourth movement), and to long pizzicato passages. Yet the work makes a cohesive, unified whole. I was fascinated by the transitions between movements in this work, and in the fifth quartet, as musical passages of widely different characters flow seamlessly together. Thus the work opens with a lengthy, emotional solo for cello which, after elaboration by the other insturments, shifts imperceptibly into the following scherzo. The adagio consists, as I mentioned, of a section for cello and viola juxtaposed against a figure for the two violins, and these two competing voices are ultimately unified into a taut section which becomes the basis for the long variation movement which concludes the work. The variations work up to a climax (and the thematic material remains identifiable throughout) and then the bubble bursts as Carter closes the work with a solo for the violin, quiet and high in the instrument's register.
The fifth quartet, composed in 1995, has a lighter texture. It consists of 12 short movements played without pause and lasts only about 21 minutes. In this work, short sections of a distinct musical character are juxtaposed against an opening introduction and against sections marked "interlude". There are two slow movements, the fourth and the tenth, three scherzo-like movements, the second, sixth, and eighth, and a concluding pizzacato movement, with some odd sounds from the instruments, marked capriccioso. The fascination of the work lies in the interrelationship of these sections with the interludes, as Carter joins the movements together by weaving moments from the surrounding short pieces into the interludes -- which have a deceptively sketchy style. Thus, interlude II, takes up the slow, expressive character of the preceding Lento, but turns at the last moment to transition to the following presto. Interlude V, in contrast, only makes a gesture towards the previous adagio before it sets the stage for the final Capriccioso. I listened several times to this work straight through and, on my last hearing, watched the second timer on my CD so that I could see directly how the movements flowed together.
Carter's music will not appeal to those listeners with exclusively conservative musical tastes. But listeners with a background in classical music who wish to be adventurous will respond to the music of Elliott Carter. Naxos is doing a great service in making Carter's music available to a wide audience at a budget price.
Robin Friedman
9 of 12 found the following review helpful:
The short preview tracks are enough to say purchase now! Feb 01, 2008
At age 50, I have had a life long and developing appreciation of less than strongly tonally centered music, starting with love of Schoenberg's works when I was merely a late teenager. Listening over time has strengthend my appreciation, and listening to great masters like Sessions, Ligeti, Cowell, and many others, bears increasing satisfaction in seeing the history of the 20th Century start to ripen in retrospection. This includes the more avante garde to even the more romantic solves to the 20th century puzzle such as the Brits and their creative resurrection of alternate modes with shadows of the prefunctional western harmony of the Renaissance. Elliot Carter's musical language seems to have a mastery of all the 20th century idioms and a plasticity which tells of a genius that uses in facile ease any style to render real, organic, story telling, or real, organic emotional states which turns musical fluency into great art, soul wringing music; one which edifies and gives glory to God's creation and creation of sound, serving to move one to visions of man's existence in God's universe of ultimate truth. This is what great art does.
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